Stage Russia (Firm)

In 1917 Russia was wracked by revolution, famine, war, and unrest. And yet, all that year children were born. This is a film about some of those children, 100 years later. RESILIENCE captures their unbelievable life stories.

Based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, Kama Ginkas’ astounding re-imagining highlights and builds off of the Chekhovian tension between the beauty of life and the tragedy of how it is lived. The story tells the the tragic tale of philosophy student Andrey Vasil'ich Kovrin (stage and screen star Sergey Makovetskiy).. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky at the estate of her father. As...

Lilianna Lungina, a revered Russian translator, analyzes the major events of 20th century Russia through the prism of her own life. Oleg Dorman's brilliant film, which became a sensation when finally released over 4 nights on Russian television in 2009, is at once heartfelt and unsentimental―an unparalleled tribute to a lost world.

The rich inner world of the renowned Georgian screenwriter, artist and puppeteer Rezo Gabriadze is as fantastic as the animation into which he has poured this story of his life. Rezo’s director son, Leo Gabriadze, who previously made the hit horror film Unfriended (2014), leaves it to his father to talk about a life suffused with magical thinking. The movie is an autobiographical animated documentary questioning ideas of deep humanity, kindness...

Timofey Kulyabin's Golden Mask Award winning ONEGIN removes all expectations of Pushkin's novel in verse and places you in today's world, immersed in the inner thoughts, hopes, despairs, passions and disappointments that drift in, through and around the 4 central figures, Onegin, Tatiana, Olga and Lensky. The work is a hypnotic, quiet love story that perfectly conveys the attitude of the great poet and how very much his masterwork still resonates...

Timofey Kulyabin, the 32 year old wunderkind artistic director of the Red Torch Theatre in Novosibirsk, has taken Anton Chekhov’s classic work and reinvented it as an epic parable about finding harmony through suffering. The entire cast, save for one, communicate throughout the performance solely in sign language. Like a score, every scene is composed with sounds and noises. You can hear the wind whistling around the house, shrieking migratory birds,...

Anton Chekhov's first of four major plays dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between its four main characters: Boris Trigorin, a well-known writer, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the would-be playwright Konstantin Treplev. Yury Butusov's Golden Mask Award-winning production abounds in an incredible freedom and openness, delving deep into the throes of artistic creation and the anguish of the artist who...

Rimas Tuminas' adaptation of two novels by Grigory Kanovich, is a dreamy, ruminative, comedic road trip, centering around the parlous fortunes of Eastern European Jews at the start of the 20th century. A period piece that carries a modern conscious, Smile Upon Us, is a Becket-like "Waiting for Jehovah" featuring three towering figures from the Russian stage, Viktor Sukhorukov, Aleksei Guskov and Vladimir Simonov.

Written during the abortive Russian Revolution of 1905, Maxim Gorky's brilliant darkly comic "CHILDREN OF THE SUN" depicts the new middle-class, foolish perhaps but likeable, as they flounder, philosophize, and yearn for meaning, all while being totally blind to their impending annihilation. Multi-award-winning director Timofey Kulyabin's (Three Sisters, Onegin) modernized production, set in 1999 at Stanford University, focuses on the interplay between...

An in-depth investigation into the working process of Konstantin Stanislavski, who managed to maintain his inner freedom and true artistry within the harsh boundaries of the Soviet system, all thanks to the power of his prodigious talent. The best and brightest of Russian and British theatre, from Kirill Serebrennikov to Yury Butusov to Marina Brusnikina, Declan Donnellan, Katie Mitchell and Lev Dodin express their inexhaustible admiration for Stanislavski...